


Leslie's Run-In With the Bat Clan

by TheOnlyHuman



Series: AU: Deep Claws [7]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Bat Clan, Batfamily Feels, Female Dick Grayson, Female Talon Dick Grayson, Hurt Dick Grayson, Swearing, bat down, leslie doesn't know if they're vigilantes or heroes, vigilante-hero confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 08:23:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18362249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOnlyHuman/pseuds/TheOnlyHuman
Summary: (2021.)Or half of it.Really, it's a wonder how they hadn't met already.





	Leslie's Run-In With the Bat Clan

 

Leslie has her curlers and hair net in and ready when a loud bang rattles her back door, toppling a precariously perched potted cactus from the windowsill and slanting her favourite picture of some beach near Florida.

She's in half the mind to ignore the knocking as she rights her painting and ignores the cactus -one her son had bought her years ago but she hadn't had the heart to burn _yet_ (she hated cacti). Then, a shout, loud, angry, _scared,_ rings out and she decides to listen.

"Thompkins, we know you're in! Open it up before ya find yoursel' missin' a door!"

And well, if Leslie was spurred on by this idle threat, she wouldn't have been currently living. As it was, she'd lived the border between Dead End and Middle Gotham for far too long and was unplused.

Of couse, that changed whenever her door really did burst off its hinges, clattering to the floor. It spits out red painted wood chippings with a sad groan.

_It's too late for this,_ she thinks, blinking down at her door.

Now, Leslie may be a qualified septuagenarian but she still has some spunk left in her, hence why she is _qualified._ At the sight of her lovely little door that had been on its hinges for over nineteen years, she hobbled over to her kitchen drawers and pulled out a steak knife with speed most affinited with the young and lively. It was the sharpest knife she owned and although it didn't look like much, she knew how to cut throats with scalpels.

Leslie Thompkins was no alien to death. She'd seen her fair share of cut throats in her time.

She knew what it took to defend herself and others. She'd do what she had to.

"Thompkins!" A rough voice, the same one to threaten her door before subsequently breaking it down, called. It made her heart thump in her ears and her stomach coil in fearful determination.

She clutched the knife tighter in sweaty hands. What had she done this time to deserve such violence?

"Why are you here?" She stepped out, her protectiveness of her clinic far overpowering a sudden small voice that _hey, you might die._

Leslie stopped short at the sight that greeted her.

There stood, in her doorway, Red Hood, his helmet glinting a horrid red as the streetlights reflected off it, a limp woman in black cradled in his arms, close to his chest. Three people were behind him, enigmas she knew to be Red Robin, Spoiler and Black Bat, in that order.

"Please, we—" Hood started, he seemed to be shivering but the night was warm and Leslie noticed how he hugged the woman _-Nightwing,_ she had to be- in his arms tighter. Something dropped to her grimey tiled floor, seeping into the cracks in an orange-lit show of black. Leslie hopes it isn't what she thinks it is. "We need your help."

But of course. Why else would they be here other than to kill her?

The other three shifted in her doorway, nearly blocked out by the bulk of Red Hood. Despite that, Leslie could clearly see the signs that meant they were ready for rejection.

Leslie took a small, shallow breath and took a good look at Red Hood. The man looked ragged, his usual leather jacket that journalists caught him wearing in pictures being wrapped around Nightwing who he cradled so carefully, as if she were porcelain. His boots were scuffed and his helmet's gleaming white eyes felt as if they were boring into her, begging for help.

One look at this man and she knew. She knew he did not beg easily.

"Get in," she ordered, standing back as the hero (but was anyone really a hero in this city?) lumbered in, gait tense like he expected her to double cross him. Leslie knew from experience she had to tread lightly with these ones.

She pulled them through her house and into the official clinic part, leading them into the isolated multi-use wards for both recovery and operations.

"You three sit out here," she said to the trailing puppies, directing them into the waiting section's seats. Leslie aimed her pointed gaze at Hood. "Set her down on the table and join them."

Hood hesitated in leaving when she went to shoo him out. He clutched Nightwing's limp hand and it didn't take a fool to know she was probably his girl. His voice was a near whisper, even with the helmet on. "What if she wakes up?"

Leslie gave the woman a glance-over. From the way her wrist seemed to be stiff and how her mask was unmoving, compared to how the other one's had been constantly shifting, she didn't think Nightwing would be waking up for a while. Not to mention the black-moreso-red blood that drooled from her lips.

Her uniform was wreaked too. It had probably once been a sleek, shiny black but now it was bathed in dirt, mud and what seemed like the plaster dust of those terrible walls down in the lower city's alleys. Leslie had a rough idea of what had happened.

"She'll be fine," she said briskly, already puttering about to grab gloves and haul over her wheely tray of bandages and disinfectants. When she turned around Hood was still there, large frame hunched over the woman, making her seem so small. Leslie said, softer, "Go out there and sit down. I'll be out soon to debrief."

Something, maybe it was something she said, or the frail, aging hand on his bulging biceps, made him look up and chuckle weakly. He stepped back but instead of leaving, grabbed a chair from the far corner and hauled it over, dropping down in it. It gave a worrying groan.

Now that he was still she could see how his hands shook in her peripheral. It wasn't because of nerves, no—

Leslie would've seen that, she got loads of awkward kids round here. No, the thing that shook his hands was something she seen all too often from streetlivers; it was anger.

Anger so pure it had become _rage_. Rage that shook his hands and set his body still, kept him stone cold even as he hunched in on himself in the chair.

"Dark's gonna be devastated," the man muttered into his intertwined fingers.

Leslie ignored him and instead gave her newest patient a full body check.

 

 

She manages to get rid of Hood when she announces the need for surgery. Leslie really knows Nightwing can't wait any longer and she treats everyone, from thugs to the occasional mob boss.

"Do it," Red Hood grunts. "I have the authority to make a choice on her behalf. Just don't kill her."

The threat is there, lingering stiffly, but Leslie takes in the atmosphere and scares the vigilante-hero off to wait with the rest of his possé. It doesn't take a fool to know the street rumours, of Hood and Nightwing always being together.

She doesn't make any promises but she does her best to reassure him that she'll do her best for his wife. If he's surprised he doesn't show it, so he's a pretty good actor.

That or he's falling into shock.

 

 

Nightwing wakes up halfway through the surgery, opens her eyes and forms a coherent thought despite the fact that she's under enough painkillers to put someone into a coma.

Leslie's got her back open, digging pieces of her lower vertebrates out of places they _should not be_ , when the woman under her groans, fingers scrabbling for purchase on cold metal, the heart monitor warbling like a dying whale.

"Hey, you're in safe hands," she says immediately, voice coming out in what she hopes is a reassuring tone. There's a split second as the vigilante-hero sucks in a ragged breath and Leslie wonders if she can feel the bone fragments floating around inside of her. "Do you remember what happened?"

A second passes and although Leslie can't see her face she can almost imagine the sour look she's sporting.

"Yes," Nightwing grunts as Leslie pulls put a particularly large chunk of her middle sectioned vertebrae. She's going to need metal. A lot of it.

Leslie pauses, waits for an elaboration but the heart monitor has smoothened out from the faint skip it had adopted when she'd awoken. She's unconscious again.

 

 

Ten hours later, Leslie's trying so hard to not show her worry but with three pupiless pairs of white splotches that she knew had eyes underneath them, staring at her, it was a tad hard.

"She what?" The one with the black tack-on mask and purple hood that was now down, letting her blonde hair free -Spoiler- asked.

Leslie knew it was hard to take in but even Red Robin, the one with the black cowl and the two belts around his chest, who was meant to be the smart one, was seemingly relapsing. "Pardon me?"

"Three of her vertebrae have been crushed. Just how did that happen?" Leslie wasn't even angry, she was just confused. She didn't even know how the woman could've done that without having any other injuries from something such as a fall.

The woman with the full face covering mask that had brief imprints of her eyes, nose, cheekbones and mouth, her mouth of which seemed to be stitched in a small frown, whispered something that Leslie's ears couldn't and didn't pick up.

"You're going to need to speak up."

"Bane," she repeated and images of Bane, venom crazy, riddled Leslie's mind from the last time he'd rampaged. It had given her more patients than she'd known what to do with, too many to count, not enough beds. Carefully she schooled her shock into a cool blank facade that usually reassured people.

They seemed to grow more panicked.

"Will she recover?" Spoiler asked, tone skipping with worry.

Leslie smothered her wince. "Depends what you mean by recover."

"Will there be any long term effects?" Red Robin clarified, pulling his fingers and popping the knuckles nervously. Her inner voice screamed at the horrible habit.

"She'll definitely have back pain, could be really bad or barely anything; there will be residual scarring from the ten hour surgery I just pulled; she'll need to wear the back brace I'm giving her if she wants to heal at all and if worst comes to worst, she may never walk again."

Red Hood was being suspiciously quiet in the waiting room corner. Egads, he hadn't moved in the five minutes she'd been there.

"Any more questions?"

"Any recommended meds?" Hood gurgled, voice thick.

Leslie sighed, "I'm sure you lot go through about a box a day of each kind but if she sticks to what I'll perscribe and refills, she should get by."

"How long will Nightwing need your brace?" Black Bat spoke up, still as a statue. Leslie couldn't get a good read on her or Hood and it annoyed her. Usually she was quite decent with reading body language, seeing how many abused people came through her doors daily.

But then, she supposed they _were_ Bats.

"She could need it for a year or five. Minimum, I'd say around six months and then if she could come to me or another specialist for a checkup that timeline could be confirmed."

"Maxium?" Red Robin asked.

"The rest of her life," it was a shame, the woman seemed so young too. Barely thirty-five from the looks of it.

The silence was thick.

Finally, eventually, Red Hood nodded. "Thanks."

Leslie took it at face value and announced she was going to bed and to not ransack the place _or else._

In the morning, after she'd climbed down the rickety stairs, curlers still in, bedrobe still tied, and spotted the empty waiting room she'd sighed. She hadn't needed to look into the ward to know they'd left.

At least they took the meds and brace. They even left a little note on her kitchen table.

_Thanks_ _Doc,_

_Bat Clan._

A roll of fifties sat arrogantly beside it. She snorted.


End file.
